A value-driven career

Two teaspoons sugar and a pinch of lime

Today was the height of it. We hadn’t got our power point ready at all. No one knew the speeches at all. To top it off, the professor was yelling at us for the presentations starting late. What a way to start my last presentation in college.

About a month ago we were blessed with the audacious assignment of coming up with a new product which you may have read about in my previous posts. We came up with numerous ideas for project: Here are some of the ideas we had for our new product in Entrepreneurship:

Space for bands to practice ‘Jam Stations’

Broom (Indian Jhadu) with a vacuum cleaner

Shoes with Torches on them to help trekkers and villagers see while walking

Electric and Portable Tiffin box warmers.

Packaged coconut water (it’s available in plenty)

Packaged Samosa fillings

Etc.

All of them were sequentially shot down by our professor either because they were already available or because they would be a flop. In the end, one of my group member’s who’d been to a place in Pune, Maharashtra, told us of a sandwich that he’d eaten. It was covered in chocolate and was filled with it too. We thought the idea was yummy and told our professor about it. She agreed! Not long thereafter a friend of ours told us that this product or a variant of it was already available in the market. Back to square one? No, he said he wouldn’t blow the whistle. Thank heavens. 🙂

Chocolate Sandwiches : The best we could come up with!

My friend Madhu and I, worked our bu**s off last night on 2 year’s vertical revenue statements and 12 month’s sales estimates. Oh and graphs too. The rest of the group covered the manufacturing and promotion aspect of the product in brief. We left Madhu’s place after working together for 12 hours straight, at 12.30am in the night. That is very late! Came home and slept for what seemed like a moment getting up for the presentation at 6.30am. I reached college at 9.40 and the professor was irritated with my group because we did not report on time and neither did a group who were to present in the slot before ours turn up. She was screaming into our ears. When asked to go first, we politely let another group take the first spot. She had cooled down by the end of that presentation. Oh did I mention that we had no classy PowerPoint ready at all? Just pointers on a slide. Hardly any pictures, no speeches and no practice. Our presentation seemed to be an impending disaster. Our product didn’t seem to have the ‘oomph’ factor at all.

To my surprise, everything went well. The lack of good slides wasn’t felt. The fact that we were missing some really important photographs of our product didn’t matter either. The class loved our product. We stuffed her with the balance sheets and vertical revenue statements and were on stand-by, ready with every answer for any question that she would throw back at us. She did, and we were able to answer every one of them nicely.

She accepted our project called it ‘very good’ with ‘lots of hardwork’. My friends said that the balance sheet was is what ‘won’ us the presentation. There was joy all around, at least in my group! 😀

On the train, while coming back home, I was thinking about how well the presentation went. And then I also remembered, this was our last presentation in St. Andrew’s College. Precious moments like sleepovers, late night dinners, catching the last train 3 nights in a row, no sleep for 24 hours… I’m going to miss them bad!